Extreme Green Education.

Extreme Green Wealth Building.

NOTE: Every single aspect of this project has been done somewhere else

and done successfully. It’s just that no one else has combined all

these aspects together into a SYNERGISTIC whole before.

Welcome Green people! And thank you for coming to this website.

What you’re looking at is my plan to create a large scale, low cost, very Green Cooperative Housing Idea Project.

This is a low-cost, long term solution for a Sustainable future in the areas of energy, water, food, housing and Green Small Business Development

It is designed to be a demonstration project that can be used as a guide, for similar projects around the world. Each new project will be an improvement on the last project. It will always be ready to change because of differing conditions and new or different technologies.

The purpose of this project is to be an example of being as Green as possible for the cost.

(Sweat equity plays a large part of keeping costs low. Therefore, an integral part of this Project is to make the sweat equity as satisfying as possible.)

Think of this Project as an Extremely Green Village where 1000+ committed Coop Members will live and work together.

Later versions could be any number! The design has a centrally located Town Center. All the facilities within the Town Center are intended to be social and services meeting places as well as the center of Green commerce. The Town Center will help develop new Green businesses and initiatives. The Project is desinged to support all the Coop Members to be as Green as possible.

When completed, there will be approximately 300 to 400 Green-Burbia Coop member owned townhouses, 200 to 400 Town Center Green City Living Coop units, 650 Coop owned 12” by 24” storage units. The storage units will produce income to not only allow for a larger Town Center investment providing more services but will eliminate the need for Coop fees. A percentage of Green-Burbia and Green City Living units will be used for rental units and conventioneer housing.

This small Green village is designed to be pedestrian centric, pushing cars behind homes to backyard access.

The front yards connect on either side to a meandering 19-foot wide hike and bike walkway. In the future, the common walkways will be shaded from our hot Austin, Texas sun using solar ink coated sunshades and generating electricity.

The effective density of population will be at least 10 to 14 people per acre in the small Green Village and that is a good density for this design. Yet with people living closer together, privacy is a primary challenge.

Compressed Earth Blocks have been chosen as the major building material for this project because of its unique properties. It can be thought of as adobe on steroids. When it is 100 degrees outside it can still be around 80 degrees inside and all without air conditioning. And these buildings can last for hundreds of years.

Would you like more good information about Compressed Earth Blocks?

(for more, click on “About the Buildings” on the right column.)

The Coop Housing units will be a one-story design with two common walls. The roof will be made with compressed earth blocks using a barrel vault structure. You can park a truck on this type of roof. No typical construction building material can create a rooftop garden as cheaply. The key is the compressive strength of the arch.

This is a small Green village that promotes privacy where the roofs are gardens, greenhouses or grass. The design has high walls so that each housing family has a private rooftop and a private backyard. An additional reason for the high backyard walls is that in the hot months of the year, the kitchen can be rolled into the back yard!

As a design issue, this may be a small one for you, but for me it’s another reason for a private back yard and a private roof. Children need private space outside so that they can make a fort or camp outside when they are really young. Most city kids can’t have that. But they can here! You can too.

Privacy and sound dampening. With 28-inch thick compressed earth block walls, a happy screaming child can live happily next door to an all night Rocky I-IX movie marathon. In addition to that, I will have an additional white noise sound dampening system.

The Town Center is very important in this design. It is organized so that most Coop Members will visit it everyday on foot or with a tricycle or bike for their necessities. To pick up mail, wash or pick up cleaned clothes, pick up groceries, prepared meals, to drop off dirty dishes and pick up clean ones.

This Project is designed so that it will have the most innovative work-sharing program in the history of Cooperatives, saving 17-35 hours a week for participating households.

That simple grocery delivery service where the Coop Member orders online and picks the groceries up at Town Center is a simple solution to save at least 500,000 miles of personal driving a year for Coop Members. At 20 MPG that’s at least 25,000 gallons saved a year!

I’m also looking into a Coop Car Share program. You have a car but your round trip commute to work is 50 miles. What if you could use one of the Coop’s one or two passenger 150-MPG commuter vehicles?

The entire project is designed to be 100% wheelchair accessible.

This is another very important part of the Projects design, 100% water recycling. The Project will have full rain collection from the entire complex. 1 inch of rain on an acre is equal to 27,000 gallons! 100 acres is 2,700,000 gallons!! Recycling of gray water and collecting rainwater will create a surplus far beyond the needs of the Project. We can provide water for neighbors! Not only saving ground water from wells and city water, but in Austin, Texas, the highest energy cost in the city is moving the water and sewage. Remember, Venice, Italy used rainwater as their sole source of water for many, many years.

The building of the Project will be videotaped and promoted for TV, cable, and educational videos and viral.

So this is what I will create in the big picture. What I need is money to fund a Small Demonstration Project that shows aspects of the large Project. It may not be you but the people looking at this should at least know someone else who would have the means and interest in seeing a project such as this come to fruition. And if you don’t know anyone, ask. Find someone. This Green Cooperative Housing Idea Project won’t succeed without the help of aware, motivated, Green people.